“... we’d passed through Bellot Strait – the first ship ever to do so in October. We were 350 miles north of the Arctic Circle, but there was no ice. The two straits are part of the Northwest Passage, the so-called ‘Arctic Grail’. From Martin Frobisher in 1576 to John Franklin in 1845, generations of European explorers ...”

“... Democratic politics since 1960, when, at the age of twelve, he sported a large campaign button for John F. Kennedy. Until recently he was a co-editor of Dissent, which prides itself on being the nation’s oldest democratic socialist magazine. His previous books include The Populist Persuasion (1995), an illuminating analysis which predated the recent ...”

“... herself barred from most of the best hotels in Europe. Ava Gardner had a lot of fun. She came from North Carolina, the last of six children in a poor farming family. Discovered when her photograph was spotted in a New York photo-store window (it had been taken by the store’s manager, Larry Tarr, who was the boyfriend of Ava’s older sister), she was ...”

“... What is wrong with the idea of a world state? John Rawls, the world’s most celebrated living political philosopher, believes that the answer is relatively straightforward. ‘I follow Kant’s lead in Perpetual Peace,’ he writes, ‘in thinking that a world government – by which I mean a unified political regime with the legal powers normally exercised by central government – would either be a global despotism or else would rule over a fragile empire torn by frequent civil strife as various regions and peoples tried to gain their political freedom and autonomy ...”

“... Frankfurt and part of Hesse-Darmstadt were all annexed by Prussia, and the remaining German states north of the River Main incorporated into a Prussian-dominated North German Confederation with a constitution drawn up at Bismarck’s instigation. In the south, only four independent German states ...”

“... alone, and liaise with my opposite numbers in Paris, Copenhagen and Stockholm, as well as in North America, Australia and Japan, where the anti-war youth movement was particularly strong. We were most wary of Nato’s Visiting Forces Act, which mandated police forces to ‘detain and arrest’ absentees. Although Harold Wilson’s government winked at ...”

“... and other towns must be asked their opinion’ before London makes any decisions. In Gaskell’s North and South, it’s only when the spectre of centralisation is raised that the sturdily ineloquent mill-owner Mr Thornton can rise to the rhetorical level of Margaret Hale: I belong to Teutonic blood; it is little mingled in this part of England to what it ...”

“... as black have been in Britain for more than two thousand years. During the third century, North African Roman soldiers formed part of the occupation of the British Isles: ‘Aurelian Moors’ were stationed at Aballava at the west end of Hadrian’s Wall, near the Solway Firth. In the fourth century a number of people with ...”

“... leadership of Artorius Castus, their enemies later being misunderstood as not Caledonians from the north, but Saxons from the east? The first supposition is highly unlikely, the second even more so. There is ‘not a shred of evidence for it’, Higham reports. (It becomes one of his favourite phrases.)The Sarmatian theory was taken up in Antoine Fuqua’s ...”

“... contained a variety of small worlds, in Lancashire as different as Bolton. ‘the Geneva of the North’, and the coastal Fylde, in 1600 as Popish as Ireland. It has been a widespread assumption that the true story of the English Reformation, an accurate account of its pace, progress and ultimate profundity, will consist of the sum of these many parts, the ...”

“... the great proconsuls, but young men representatively on the loose – James Brooke of Sarawak, John and Henry Lawrence of the Punjab, Charles Gordon, Lawrence of Arabia, William Sleeman who destroyed Thuggee, Frederick Lugard who conquered Northern Nigeria. If such men became proconsuls it often diminished rather than brightened their radiance. At that ...”

“... should resist this kind of creeping socialisation. A Belgian musician and designer of automata, John Joseph Merlin, first skated on an early version of roller blades while playing the violin in 1760. But if roller-skating has a long history, it has only a short literature. Unlike cricket, it does not command literary partisans of the calibre of Harold ...”

“... The Auk, however, has always had his own champions: notably, his two previous biographers, John Connell and Roger Parkinson, and Correlli Barnett, who, in The Desert Generals (1960), went so far as to describe Montgomery’s Alamein as ‘an unnecessary battle’. Now Philip Warner has attempted a reassessment of Auchinleck’s career in the light of ...”

“... Garret FitzGerald and Ian Paisley, while managing not to criticise Gerry Adams, fawning upon John Hume, and eulogising Charles Haughey – currently the object of scandalised enquiry – if with veiled threat: ‘Haughey has still to show that he knows where the British see their interest to lie. But, in the interval, he skilfully combines de Valera’s ...”

“... Several hundred men and their telescopes in a supermarket car park in Kent watching the first North American golden-winged warbler to be recorded in Europe, a few grams of yellow feathers blown across the Atlantic: the anoraks and their obsession are weird but recognisably British. If birding is associated with the comedy of teenage gawkiness it also has ...”